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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Super Golden! War of the Go-Bots

Even today, golden books have been a standard in kids books. The classics are best known as the little engine that could sort of thing. Great morals and fun stories for kids. But Golden books and many other publishers put out other books too, many of them tying in with pop culture licenses. The golden book's line was called "Super Golden"

I have fond memories of these books and have been tracking some of them down and I am going to begin to do some posts with cometary on some of these these books, and there is no time like the present, so I am going to jump right in with "War of the Gobots"

The go-bots get a bad rap any way for being the redheaded step child of the transformer (even though they came first) so a book for this line is going to get some mixed reaction. This particular super golden book is probably one of the weakest in terms of art, but there are some parts that stand out to me.

I had this particular book as a kid and it always confused me. It was kind of dark, and the cover didn't help that.

The cover depicted a painted scene from the book and it all seems normal, except for Scooter, who seems to be busting up Turbo, with a menacing grin. If you watched the Cartoon as a kid, these were both good guys. This always seemed off to me. Perhaps the artist was trying to depict Scooter fixing Turbo. . . if so he failed.

Bits of the book look as if they just lifted parts from the toy instructions.

I always felt they tried too hard to make cy-kill menacing. In this case they felt the need to show his face face. The art in general isn't terrible, but it does feel as if the artist is phoning this in!

Even in the cartoon the bad guys (Renegades) always felt like they were over compensating with the size of their weapons!

Then you get to meet the good guys, all of them smiling. . . you know because they are the good guys!

And this is here the story kind of gets depressing (and confusing all at the same time. Cy-Kill shoots turbo from his wheel, Leader-1 protects him, and scooter makes a snide remark.

The text makes us think Turbo will be OK, but the image shows his head disembodied. Seems a bit much I think!

And that is War of the Go-bots. It weighs in at a whopping 23 pages and is a pretty easy reader, with simple sentences which are perfect for the very young children it was geared toward.

So tell me, do you have memories of Super golden Books or other children's books? Share them!